What did Steve Jobs have in common with Ben Franklin?  (Yes, Ben Franklin, founding father.)  And what do the life stories of either of these men have to do with you and sitcom writing? 

I’m currently reading Walther Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin.  A few months ago, I read Isaacson’s best-selling biography of Steve Jobs.  Every week I read the e-mails that come in to this website from people who say they want a break in show business but can’t figure out how to get it.

Here’s one thing that Ben Franklin and Steve Jobs had in common.  If they wanted something, they figured out how to get it.  And right there is the key to your success in television or the movies.  If you really want it, figure out how to get it.

Jobs and Franklin were not geniuses in the usual sense.  Neither man was an Einstein.  Neither Jobs nor Franklin had a lot of formal education.  But both Jobs and Franklin were relentless in their pursuit of success.  Both men were extremely ambitious and competitive. Each man started very young pursuing his ambitions.  Both men were willing to compete tirelessly and sometimes viciously against rivals.  Both Jobs and Franklin were shameless networkers, willing to call on people that they didn’t know and ask them for help or guidance.  Jobs, when he was still a kid, cold-called one of the founders of Hewlett-Packard. Franklin, as a young man barely out of his teens, boldly introduced himself to the movers and shakers of Philadelphia.  Ben Franklin started out in the printing business, which was the high-tech industry of the early eighteenth century.  He worked long hours month after month and year after year to learn his trade, to save his money, to start his own business, to win customers, nurture friendships, and make contacts that would help him further his career.  Franklin was bold, using his talents as a writer and entrepreneur to make himself wealthy and famous.  Steve Jobs was also extremely bold and visionary, willing to risk everything on a new idea and working tirelessly to make that idea into a reality.

I keep telling you on this blog that if you want to be a TV writer, you too have to be bold, competitive, tireless, and aggressive.  You have to abandon your comfort zone and take huge risks, just as Jobs and Franklin did. 

Ben Franklin saw no future for himself in his home town of Boston, so he literally ran away to Philadelphia.  In Franklin’s day, Philadelphia was the new city on the rise.  Steve Jobs happened to grow up in Northern California, and when he saw the tech revolution beginning in what is now Silicon Valley, he made it his business to meet the people who were leading the way.  The TV and movie industry is in Los Angeles.  If you want to be a part of that industry and you still live somewhere else, you have to ask yourself how serious you really are.

There are no guarantees of success in any endeavor.  You may want to be a TV or screen writer, but you may lack the talent or the drive to actually make it.  But if you’re wondering how people do make it, you might want to read about Steve Jobs or old Ben Franklin.  Here were two young men who let nothing stand in their way on their zealous drive toward success.